Air New Zealand - Flight booking trick

28 Feb 2011

There is a quick update to all of you. I would no longer fly from Christchurch to Wellington, but to Auckland instead. The reason is very simple and obvious, if you heard any news regarding the higher earthquake risk in Wellington after the earthquake happened in Christchurch on 22 Feb.

Guess what? I was only aware about the higher risk the next day after I have made a flight booking to Wellington. To bring down our worries, also our families', we have decided to change the flight, despite the NZD50 extra charge.

To our disappointment, it was not as easy as what we thought. Changing destination online was not allowed and we were asked to make a call. At that moment, we were actually not sure if changing destination was not allowed, or just simply we couldn't do that online. We tried to call but it was not answered.

We had to make a decision, whether to wait for a few more days until the call was successful, or we just grab a separate ticket (NZD79) before they were sold out. A miracle appeared. Just right after 12am NZ time, we saw they are giving hot fare. For our desired timeslot, there was only one ticket left at the price of NZD40.

There were some confusion working with their booking system. Hopefully our experience can help you in your next booking. In the booking request form, we were asked to key in the date and number of persons as usual. The result turned out to be different when we searched for single person and 3 persons.

Here was what happened. There was only one hot fare ticket left for the slot 8pm. When we searched for 3 persons, we can only see a normal fare row item for 8pm time slot. But if we searched for 1 person, we can see one hot fare row item for 8pm time slot too. Please take not that they actually belong to the same flight. I think the reason was there was only one hot fare ticket left. When we searched for three, the hot fare didn't show up as it was not enough for three. The system just can't display hot fare row item and normal fare row item for the same flight separately.

Unfortunately we were not aware of this at the beginning. We searched for three persons all the while and we thought there was no hot fare ticket until my partner searched for one person.

So it is good that we always check for the flight number, departure time and different number of persons.

We end up purchased one hot fare ticket, and two normal fare tickets and we shared the total expenses among three of us. It saved each of us around NZD10 and yet we still can travel on the same flight, sitting at the same row.